Total Conviction Wholly Vindicated, Wolf Alice.

“We’ve had our ups and downs, but I can remember us always having little chats in which we’d tell ourselves we were gonna make it.”

Wolf Alice guitarist and tunesmith-in-chief Joff Oddie reticently exclaimed the above when we met up on the sunnier side of summer, and in Blush – the title track from the north London four-piece’s forthcoming début EP – he and Ellie Rowsell finally sound as though they’ve fully arrived. “Don’t chicken out; it’s all good/ You’re allowed to be what you could” they chime in chorus a couple minutes in, and not only does the ensuing release exude a sense of relief, but it totally vindicates the conviction the duo have valiantly maintained all along. Rowsell’s vocal breathy and atypically ethereal, blustery crushes of treble crash against Joel Amey’s drivetime drums to create a feel of hitherto unfelt majesty. Grandiosity rarely emerges from the grubby murk of these parts, although then again Wolf Alice increasingly seem anomalies in what can otherwise be a pretty humdrum genre…